One Fifth Avenue by Candace Bushnell

Author:Candace Bushnell
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Tags: Chick lit, Contemporary Women, Fiction, Romance, Manhattan (New York, Cooperative, Young women, Apartment houses, General, N.Y.)
ISBN: 9781401341404
Publisher: Voice
Published: 2010-04-27T04:37:36+00:00

12

Billy Litchfield was on the train to Springfield, Massachusetts, when he got the call from his sister informing him that their mother had fallen down and broken her hip and was in the hospital. She’d been carrying groceries when she slipped on a patch of ice. She would live, but her pelvis was shattered. The surgeons would put the pelvis back together with metal plates, but it would take a long time to heal, and she could be in a wheelchair for the rest of her life. She was only eighty-three; she might easily live for another ten or fifteen years. “I don’t have time to take care of her,” Billy’s sister, Laura, wailed on the phone. Laura was a corporate lawyer and single mom, twice divorced with two children, eighteen and twelve. “And I can’t afford to put her in a nursing home. Jacob’s going to college next year. It’s too much.”

“It’ll be fine,” Billy said. He was taking the news more calmly than he would have expected.

“How can it be fine?” his sister said. “Once something like this happens, it’s downhill all the way.”

“She must have some money,” Billy said.

“Why would she have money?” his sister said. “Not everyone is like your rich friends in New York.”

“I’m aware of how other people live,” Billy said.

“You’re going to have to move back to Streatham and take care of her,” his sister said warningly. “She was grocery shopping for you. She normally only shops on Thursday mornings,” she added accusingly, as if the accident had been his fault. “She made a special trip for you.”

“Thanks, dear,” Billy said.

He hung up and looked out the window. The train was pulling in to New Haven, where the landscape was depressing and familiarly bleak. Going home made him sad and uncomfortable; he’d had neither a happy childhood nor a happy home. His father, an orthodontist who believed homosexuality was a disease and that women were second-class citizens, was despised by both Billy and his sister. When his father passed away fifteen years ago, they said it was a blessing. Nevertheless, Laura had always resented Billy, his mother’s favorite. Billy knew Laura thought him frivolous and couldn’t forgive their mother for allowing Billy to study useless pursuits in college, like art and music and philosophy. Billy, on the other hand, thought his sister a dreary bore. She was absolutely ordinary; he couldn’t comprehend how nature could have supplied him with such a dull sibling. She was a drone—the very epitome of everything Billy feared a human life could become. She had no passions, either in her life or for her life, and therefore tended to exaggerate every tiny event out of proportion. Billy guessed his sister was making a bigger deal out of his mother’s fall than was necessary.

But when he got to the hospital on the outskirts of Springfield, he found his mother was worse than he’d hoped. She was always robust, but the accident had turned her into a colorless old lady

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